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[Originally published, in a different form, in Diabetes Mine, April 26, 2014].

If you’re a parent with Type 1 diabetes, the challenges created by your malfunctioning pancreas provide ready-made tools to teach your kids valuable lessons. Yes, this disease is a burden on you and your family, it can be a cruel beast, but it also gives you a chance to be a role model.

As Kerri Sparling points out in Balancing Diabetes, T1D comes “with a certain level of perspective, as a parent, and one that offers your child a special perspective all their own.” Several parents with diabetes told her they hope the disease will have a positive influence on their kids, teaching them healthy habits and empathy, among other things.

About five years ago, I stumbled upon an industry of psychologists who promoted the many benefits of gratitude. Grateful people, they claimed, are happier and healthier. They recommended keeping a “gratitude journal.” I tried but it didn’t work. I rarely had a palpable, physical experience of gratitude, just didn’t seem to be built for it. But lately, mulling over my diabetes has made it easier to give thanks. One benefit of living for decades with a chronic disease is that it yields a trove of people and incidents that are raw material for a quickening of the heart.

In the summer of 1977, when I was 23, I washed ashore to my parents’s house in Woodbridge, Connecticut after spending my first year out of college teaching in the Caribbean. I had a broken ankle, memories of a love affair that had gone very badly, no clue about how to earn a living and frequent visits from what Churchill, my second favorite depressive after Abraham Lincoln, famously called the “black dog.” During my first week in Woodbridge, I had some furious arguments with my stepfather. His dry cleaning business was failing, and he was as glum as I was about the universe. So he was understandably unable to welcome the sulking, semi-grown-up step-son sprawled on his living room couch. (more here) about Hypoglycemia Chronicle #1: Thanks, Popeye

Childhood diabetes got its 15 minutes of fame when Sonya Sotomayor was nominated to the Supreme Court in 2009. In a host of interviews and a subsequent memoir published in 2011, she recounted how she was forced to manage the disease herself as a young girl. Her father was an alcoholic and her mother was too frightened to handle the burden of keeping her daughter alive. When she was eight, Sotomayor had to boil water to sterilize a syringe –as required back then– fill it with insulin and then inject herself. She had to figure out how to stick to her rigid diet and measure food on her own. Her parents’ abdication might make them seem pathetic to those unfamiliar with diabetes, but I sympathize with them.

Vital signs

“Don’t take anything personally,” Don Miguel Ruiz advises us in The Four Agreements. He gives one good reason:

All people live in their own dream, in their own mind; they are in a completely different world from the one we live in…Even when a situation seems so personal, even if others insult you directly, it has nothing to do with you. What they say, what they do, and the opinions they give are according to the agreements they have in their own minds…

Lately, I have been trying to use my chronic disease to cultivate the skill of not taking it personally when other people are surly or selfish or creepy. I need that ability in order to live and work in New York City, which sometimes seems like the international capital of casual crankiness and bad moods.

Don Ruiz is a wise man, but he missed something important about people. They say and do things not only because of the “dreams” –and words, and memories—thrumming in their minds. Their behavior is also prompted by what is happening in their bodies at any given moment. In fact, the dreams, words and memories thrumming in their minds are shaped, at least in part, by their bodies –and not just the “thinking” parts of their brains, but also their glands, organs, lymph nodes, bones, etc.

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Thinking with the Bodymind

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